In a communications network, a provider is responsible for predicting and forecasting customer growth, monitoring traffic volume over the network, and determining when to add or update equipment based on increasing month-to-month demands. Therefore, it is critical for a provider to monitor and determine call-transaction information relating to call duration, call volume, bandwidth capabilities, memory usage, processing usage, and combinations thereof for determining when to increase or add additional hardware within the network. Determining when new equipment should be implemented within the network is important to maintain a consistent and reliable network.
Forecasting a capacity plan within a communications network has become a burdensome endeavor and chore for providers. A network comprised of tens or hundreds of voice- or data-switching facilities requires a provider to extract call-detail records or files from each switch facility, and manually generate a forecast using a spreadsheet or database program. Some of the major problems associated with performing a forecast include: manual extraction of hundreds or thousands of files associated with a months worth of call-transaction data, combining all the information associated with each file into a single merged data file, formatting the data properly into related columns or fields, sorting and formatting a proper field associated with the merged data, and creating a report by identifying and inserting the maximum transaction count into a separate spreadsheet or database. A provider may have to perform these processes on a monthly, and sometimes weekly basis. Moreover, the steps shown above require a relatively high amount of time, resources, and manpower to perform such a task for each and every switch.
The need exists, therefore, for an improved method that would allow a provider to preschedule and execute a forecast on a computer by retrieving and sorting a set of transaction files from a switch to determine the maximum transaction counts associated within a given hour, day, month, or year and present the forecast in a simple readable format.